Archives for January 2015

There comes a time in every PM’s life (perhaps even daily) when someone will ask you a question that you honestly do not know the answer to. This question might be about the product, the process, the customer, future plans, or something else business related. And, all too often, we either wind up dodging the question, redirecting the conversation, or even just making something up on the fly that sounds reasonable and is probably right, but that we’re not really certain of.

The truth is, however, that it’s entirely okay to say, “I don’t know.”

Agile development and its related methodologies and practices have long been viewed as something that “developers do” with no consideration given to the broader impacts of those processes on the organization as a whole. This, incidentally, is also the primary cause of failures on the part of organizations who attempt to implement Agile practices — the belief that all that’s changing is how the developers create, test, and deploy their code, and everyone else in the company proceeds on with business as usual.

Unfortunately, such a belief is far from the truth — in reality, companies who change from a rigorous, planned product process to an Agile process have to face the fact that they have to change the way they do business from the ground up, if they expect to gain the benefits of those changes across the board.

Ah yes, that word — “innovation” — all too often when I hear it spoken, I want to turn into Inigo Montoya and remind people that it probably doesn’t mean what they think it means (or perhaps Vizzini and just yell “INCONCEIVABLE!” at the top of my lungs and run away laughing). And, unfortunately, this has resulted in the word being relegated to the corporate doublespeak graveyard along with such illustrious company as “synergy” and “taking it offline.”

But it’s really not innovation’s fault that people don’t “get” it — it’s the fault of the people who have repeatedly misused the term, and it’s something that we as Product Managers should always be striving for. When done properly, innovation is not only a good thing, but necessary to the evolution of your company, your business, and your product. When done poorly, or with a poor understanding of what it means, it’s nothing but a death march of pointless “vision sessions” and “blue sky thinking — just more corporate doublespeak.

In an attempt to restore innovation to its rightful position in our profession, let’s dispel some common myths surrounding the term.

We’ve all been there – sitting in our chairs around a table while various people opine about some topic that may or may not be related at all to the original reason you all got together, staring at the clock, hoping and wishing and praying that the pain will end soon so that you can get back to work and back to doing something productive with your time.

Sound like a meeting to you? It doesn’t need to. In fact, there are a few very small things that you can do that can help ensure that your meetings don’t wind up being a death march that nobody in the room cares about.

By far, one of the most common questions that I run across online and in discussions at events is how to transition into a Product Management role from outside. This can often be a challenge, since in most companies there are relatively fewer Product Management roles than there are roles of other kinds — even development management jobs are more frequent and often more than Product Management, simply as a function of the number of teams your average Product Manager works with. Here are a few tips on how to assess your readiness for such a transition, as well as how to achieve that transition if it’s really something you want.

A very long time ago, I stumbled across a wonderful book entitled Getting Things Done When You Are Not in Chargeby Geoffrey Bellman. While the entire book has great tips, tricks, and advice on how to lead and achieve through influence rather than position power (a challenge that all Product Managers face daily), one chart in particular has stuck with me, and it’s something I’ve actually posted on the wall everywhere that I’ve worked. Bellman presents a very clear distinction between the definitions of Leadership and Management, presented in a format much like that of the Agile Manifesto, where leaders value those attributes on the right more than those attributes on the left. [Read more…]